Generally, as accompaniment means of making sounds of various musical instruments or something for singers, an electric accompaniment played back by electronic sounds processing devices replaces a lot of manual accompaniment with the development of the electronic engineering.
These devices offer accompaniment by synthesizing and signalizing the digital sound module for some musical instruments excluding human voice.
These days, a noraebang (karaoke) service, which integrates these electronic devices with television, and gives singers the lyric texts with background videos on TV for amusement, is common.
These accompaniment devices include memory devices storing accompaniment data for many songs, and have to update the memory devices for the latest songs.
For the portability of such accompaniment devices to accompany in outdoors, some portable devices storing the data for some songs are wired or wirelessly connected with an amplifier or TV. However, it is not easy to update the data for the latest song, therefore the devices have to be replaced by the new devices for the latest songs on regular basis.
As the development of the digital data communication and Internet, people easily download the, favorite songs, which are digitalized files including not only the accompaniment data but also the singers' voice data, and listen to them through their computer system with a sound card.
Especially, the various types of musical data in data communication networks, such as Internet, are easy to process and convert according to users' demand and equipment's need.
Lately, MP3 file is very popular, which is a compressed musical file downloaded from networks and is transmitted to a portable device through cable for playing back, but, it requires a lot of memory capacity 3 to 5 Mega bytes for 1 song) and the transmission speed is too slow.
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a kind of music file, which can automatically play back sounds, or music through the electronic devices, and it has international standards for the compatibility of the data exchange among electronic musical instruments. Most electronic musical instruments can send/receive the data based on MIDI standards. For example, the electronic musical instruments for domestic use are divided into the electronic organ, the electronic piano, the electronic keyboard, etc. and these instruments, that synthesize and output sound waves using the well-known analog or digital circuit, also follows the MIDI standards.
In other words, MIDI has been considered as international standards for the compatibility in transmitting information on playing of musical instruments, and it recommends the dedicated five-pin cable for sending/receiving channel and system messages. Also, MIDI recommends that the channel message may include the performance information, such as scale, interval, dynamic and transformation of timbre programs, etc.
Recently, there are many cases where the data can be shared with PCs (Personal Computers), and the electronic musical instruments can be controlled by the PCs. For the PCs to control the musical instruments with a MIDI port, the signals in the PC are required to be converted into MIDI signals for electronic musical instruments, and then the MIDI interface is necessarily required for this purpose. The MIDI interfaces may be divided into the intelligent type with CPU and the non-intelligent type without it. In the present techniques, sixteen-different channel information can be transmitted through just one cable, therefore the MIDI file, which has the sounds of sixteen different musical instruments, can be easily transmitted (it is obvious that the extension of the channel information is available to the ordinary skilled in the art).
The present invention is suggested as a technique using these environments and resources.
As a prior art, “Beatmania” (it is the brand name) system of “KONAMI”, which is well known as a music playing game system, will be explained concretely.
The Beatmania system is an off-line game system, which directs a playing operation to users at a predetermined point of time and, when the users get into operation based on the direction, it executes the manipulation such as a mixing of a preset playing sound wave (user input sound wave) and an effect sound wave (background music except the user input sound wave) given by Disc Jockey (DJ). It directs the timing of playing operation to the user using an indicator, a kind of electronic musical score, and the user can play the music with five buttons and one turntable.
According to the result of user's playing operation, “Beatmania” synthesizes and outputs the play sound wave and the effect sound wave.
Although, this “Beatmania” system is useful in that it makes the user play the music easily by indicating the timing of playing operations, it requires a lot of efforts for professional musicians to compose the whole piece of music, because in the “Beatmania” system, the playing sound wave to be selected by a user for a candidate musical instrument, and the rest sound wave (background sounds) for the rest of the candidate musical instrument should be separately designed for each candidate musical instrument selected by the user. That is, in this system, the design of the playing sound wave (user input wave) and the background sound wave should be repeatedly made as many as the number of musical instruments to be selected by the user, because it is impossible to design the whole music at one time by partitioning the musical notes depending on each musical instrument.
Also it has another problem in that once the music is made for “Beatmania”, the change of the file requires the same complicated procedures as the file is first made, because the musical performance file made through these procedures is a wave file.
Even if the musical performance file is compressed, it needs a few or a few dozens of megabyte because the file for the music playing game through these procedures is wave file, and, therefore the transmission of it needs large bandwidth. In result, in the current PC version, “Beatmania” has a technical limitation to be confined to off-line system, or to downgrade sound quality due to the reduction of an amount of data.
In the prior art such as “Beatmania” system, since it plays back only the wave type of the music independently stored in the game system, basically, it cannot provide on-line services such as a concert function for plural users on networks, chatting function, or evaluation function